C128 Repair Part 1

So it’s finally time to get this, one of my favorite computers, up and running!

This Commodore 128, which I got a few months ago as an ebay find (and opened in my Unpacking #002 Video), was in pretty rough shape. Beyond the two missing keys, it had a few other issues, though it did power up.

Once I pried the broken F3/F4 key off, it stopped trying to read from the non-existent floppy drive and that was a huge step forward.
I got the diagnostics ROM installed and started running it, which threw some failure conditions, but without a loopback harness, that was to be expected.

But I couldn’t get it to load things from disk. At least not from the SD2IEC device. I’m not sure if that’s a failure of the chipset, or something else yet.

Unfortunately the return key on the main keyboard doesn’t work so I can’t really do anything in C64 mode. I’ll have to have a look at that when I crack it open again.